1980
lower Manhattan. The streets are strewn with refuse, there are layered
graffiti tags, peeling decrepit walls, and manipulative advertisements
for crap everywhere you look. The daily public street-experience a pounding
affront to our culture’s deeper sensibilities and priorities - except
for the more visionary writers at large - a self-interest consumer landscape
void of its inhabitants' poetic expressions.

Avant,
the first artist group in NYC to adorn public spaces with their handmade
unique works of non-calligraphic art was born out of that vacuum. An apparent
cultural niche was explored that begged evolution in New York’s
short-lived cycles of natural selection.

Until
that point, everything that was street was done on the street.
Beyond graffiti, early Basquiat SAMO texts and Haring’s
crawling baby began to appear. Until Avant’s efforts as
artists to use the street as an exhibition space for works that were created
in the studio on paper that may otherwise be owned, exhibited and collected
had never been explored. Ultimately, Avant produced thousands
of acrylic on paper paintings and plastered them on walls, doors, bus-stops
and galleries city-wide.

The
idea of forming an anonymous group of young artist guerillas that would
be capable of mass distribution tactics like commercial ad-agencies was
a radical idea that aimed at a mass shift in public accessibility, awareness
and engagement in visual art.

The
street-as-gallery tradition was born. After avant, this venue
has become an evolving world wide establishment as countless artists and
creative people make sure that the avant garde is not restricted to the
elite institutions of art alone.